Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: aaron0013 on April 18, 2013, 07:55:22 am
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Just wanted to take a moment to say that I have gone GOKO! I just spent $20 and got DA, half of Seaside, half of Prosperity, and half of Hinterlands. This unlocked a bunch of adventures as well as the Colonies, Platinum, and Shelters.
Anyway, I played a game on Goko yesterday with pertty much no draw except a cantrip or two. The top cards in the Kingdom were KC, Expand, Hoard, Haggler, and Festival. So I says to myself "I'm gonna try to beat KC!" I went for Haggler/BM picking up a few Festivals and Expands along the way, and beat him. His KC was able to connect a few times and that got me to thinking. A KCed Festival or Haggler generates $6. If that KC had been a Gold you would have $5 after playing the same hand. Weighing the times when KC connects with nothing, I believe that in this case, Gold was as good or better than KC. I ended up winning the province split 5/3 and got a couple duchies in the meantime.
So what do you guys think? Do you think it was the right move? Do you have any other examples of beating KC? Any input would be appreciated.
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It's hard to say without knowing the rest of the kingdom.
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The thing is that the extra two plays of Festival and Haggler don't add much beyond the first other than money.
You rarely need the extra actions and buys of Festival as you will almost always buy a single high card and Haggler just doesn't add anything because the clause is "in play".
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If the kingdom REALLY had no +card at all, then yeah, you'd prefer Gold, since the KC is a conditional Gold+1$
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He said there was "a cantrip or two", though.
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I suspect the AI isn't very good at engine building?
If there was a cantrip or two it should be possible to build a nice KC engine capable of multi-province turns - in general.
But this kingdom is obviously not ideal.
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Yeah in that kingdom I don't know if I'd go for KC, I prefer it when it can chain with +cards, or when you can trash down to multiply effects... which neither festival or haggler do, those are best as 1-offs in an engine. So yeah, Hoard or Expand would be a better purchase at 7 in that kingdom... for cantrips, unless there was a power terminal like bridge, I don't think its worth 7 just to play it 3 times...
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As a general rule, it gets much harder to beat KC if there's Colonies in the game. With Colonies, the KC player has more time to build and develop his engine and then end with a whole bunch of VP buys. In a Province game, I would want a good reason to go for KC but in a Colony game I need a reason to avoid KC.
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If there is some type of draw, then KC/Expand can get pretty dominating.
Ed
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KC isn't a strategy on it's own; you need to have a good target for it. Obviously, KC+Big Money is significantly worse than just plain old big money! So I don't think it makes too sense to talk about beating "KC", it makes sense to talk about beating "KC-[something]".
KC-festival-haggler is definitely pretty bad, the only advantage from connecting the combo is +$1, as you said. Even connecting KC-KC-festival-festival-haggler doesn't give you that big of an advantage over gold-gold-haggler-festival-festival, you're only up by one province. KC supercharges engines, but if there's no draw and no engine to be made, well, there's not too much useful stuff to do with KC.
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I'd really have to know how good the cantrips are. Kc/Expand is really powerful as you can effectively turn estates into 5's and coppers into a lot of cantrips, it doesn't take too long before you can draw deck and bang a big Kc/Kc/Expand/Expand turn gaining six Prov/Duchies. If you have some cheap deck accelerators like Loan you could beat Haggler/BM.
The easiest ways to beat Kc are:
1. A lack of +gain. With no +buy and now way to gain more than 6 VP/turn, Kc can only either hurt your opponent more or make your deck more reliable. Setting a nice Kc/Smithy/Village deck is pretty weak if you can't get it to hit before 4 Provinces are gone. This is why Expand is standout card with a lot of Kc boards - you can circumvent a lot of difficulty gaining VP cards in one megaturn; lacking +buy or +gain makes Kc pretty bad on non-Colony boards.
2. Junking. Yeah Kc/Mountebank is killer when it hits, but you often won't be able to line up Kc/anything if you have a bunch of garbage in deck. There are many, many times where a second Mountebank is better than a first Kc.
3. Rushes. Igg is, of course, the king here as a good rush card and a good junker. But with poor support, Kc is just too slow to compete with a good number of rush setups - Iw/Gardens or Iw/Silk roads both can give Kc a strong detriment.
4. Combos. Chap/Bish can overcome a lot of Kc boards and adding Kc doesn't help much. A few other goldenish boards (like Bish/Lookout) can outrace slow Kc boards. Scav/Stash or Chancellor/Stash can both beat just about any Kc deck that can't gain more than 1 VP card a turn. Even the odd Nv/Horn of plenty board can be faster to megaturn than Kc.
5. Tournament. Kc often competes with Province on price and it always competes with gold - getting an early Kc can be much worse than getting the early Province or the early gold. Yeah, Kc helps line up Tournaments and provinces like nothing else, but going into Kc too early can mean you lose out on say Followers and Princess which likely decides the game.
Even the odd bloat deck can beat Kc. For instance I've used Trader/Feodum to bloat up to massive silver and stave off a strong Kc engine.
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Also generally KC is good when the Big Money variant is bad.
Nothing quite surprising there, but what I mean is that in general Big Money is not that strong so a lot of the time some strategy involving KC might easily beat it. Big Money has pretty nasty stalling issues. Haggler and Hoard counteract this stalling by keeping your economy up to par as you get Golds with Provinces.
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Hey guys. Sorry, I was at a conference all weekend. But thanks for the input. I believe the cantrip was Spy which doesn't make much of a difference. I'm glad to see that most of my assumptions were correct.
What are your thoughts if there were KC, +buy, +actions, and one cantrip, but no other draw. How often would BM win out?
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Depends on the cantrip and if there is light trashing. Cantrips that provide +$ are great.